United Airlines

United Airlines San Francisco Reviews

An hour before boarding in Seattle, the United mainframe went down worldwide. They had no back-up plan and it took them another two hours before they figured out how to get people on flights manually. Because they could call us to board at any moment, it was impossible to get something to eat (it was dinner time).

When we finally boarded the plane, three times they said we were leaving and then rescinded that announcement because more people had gotten through security and needed to board. Being diabetic, I asked for some peanuts because my blood sugar was dropping (I had expected to be in San Francisco by this time and eating dinner). His reply was they didn't serve food or snacks on this flight. We had been sitting in the airplane another hour when they finally let us off long enough to get foot from Burger King (yuck). I had to make do with the greasy food.

We finally arrived in San Francisco at 11:30 and my connecting flight on United was not listed on the marquee since it was past the departure time. The line for customer service was so long, it would have taken me several hours to get an answer about what to do. I finally found a gate agent that had just got everyone boarded, so he looked it up and said my flight hadn't left and I was to go to gate 85.

When I got there, nobody was around and nothing said anything about what flight was leaving from that gate. I asked the gate agent at the gate across from 85 and he was very rude. He said he didn't have time to look things up for me. Luckily, some flight crew arrived at gate 85 and I asked them where they were going. They were the flight I was looking for. By this time, about half a dozen other people had shown up for the same flight.

It was another 15 minutes before a gate agent showed up...briefly. She said our flight was waiting on the pilots, who were enroute from Denver and would arrive at 1:30am. Then she left.

1:30 rolled around, then 2:30 with nobody checking in on us or giving us an update. About 2:45, the pilot showed up and called for a gate agent, but it was another 30 minutes before one showed up. That was when we found out that the plane that was sitting at our gate for hours was never fueled! They only have one fuel truck at night and didn't even call in back-up to handle the massive delays the computer outage generated! It took another hour before the plane was fueld and we took off.

I arrived in San Diego at 6:30am...six hours later than I was supposed to. The only thing I got for the horrible night and inconvenience was a $25 coupon good for my next United flight (like I'll ever fly on them again!).

PS - several different friends that have flown on United have had bags lost and they never were found. That should have been my first clue.

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